This paper presents a set of intersectional feminist principles for conducting equitable, ethical, and sustainable AI research. In Data Feminism (2020), we offered seven principles for examining and challenging unequal power in data science. Here, we present a rationale for why feminism remains deeply relevant for AI research, rearticulate the original principles of data feminism with respect to AI, and introduce two potential new principles related to environmental impact and consent. Together, these principles help to 1) account for the unequal, undemocratic, extractive, and exclusionary forces at work in AI research, development, and deployment; 2) identify and mitigate predictable harms in advance of unsafe, discriminatory, or otherwise oppressive systems being released into the world; and 3) inspire creative, joyful, and collective ways to work towards a more equitable, sustainable world in which all of us can thrive.

Traditionally, natural language processing (NLP) models often use a rich set of features created by linguistic expertise, such as semantic representations. However, in the era of large language models (LLMs), more and more tasks are turned into generic, end-to-end sequence generation problems. In this paper, we investigate the question: what is the role of semantic representations in the era of LLMs? Specifically, we investigate the effect of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) across five diverse NLP tasks. We propose an AMR-driven chain-of-thought prompting method, which we call AMRCoT, and find that it generally hurts performance more than it helps. To investigate what AMR may have to offer on these tasks, we conduct a series of analysis experiments. We find that it is difficult to predict which input examples AMR may help or hurt on, but errors tend to arise with multi-word expressions, named entities, and in the final inference step where the LLM must connect its reasoning over the AMR to its prediction. We recommend focusing on these areas for future work in semantic representations for LLMs. Our code: https://github.com/causalNLP/amr_llm.

This paper introduces UQA, a novel dataset for question answering and text comprehension in Urdu, a low-resource language with over 70 million native speakers. UQA is generated by translating the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD2.0), a large-scale English QA dataset, using a technique called EATS (Enclose to Anchor, Translate, Seek), which preserves the answer spans in the translated context paragraphs. The paper describes the process of selecting and evaluating the best translation model among two candidates: Google Translator and Seamless M4T. The paper also benchmarks several state-of-the-art multilingual QA models on UQA, including mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and mT5, and reports promising results. For XLM-RoBERTa-XL, we have an F1 score of 85.99 and 74.56 EM. UQA is a valuable resource for developing and testing multilingual NLP systems for Urdu and for enhancing the cross-lingual transferability of existing models. Further, the paper demonstrates the effectiveness of EATS for creating high-quality datasets for other languages and domains. The UQA dataset and the code are publicly available at www.github.com/sameearif/UQA.

User representation learning aims to capture user preferences, interests, and behaviors in low-dimensional vector representations. These representations have widespread applications in recommendation systems and advertising; however, existing methods typically rely on specific features like text content, activity patterns, or platform metadata, failing to holistically model user behavior across different modalities. To address this limitation, we propose SoMeR, a Social Media user Representation learning framework that incorporates temporal activities, text content, profile information, and network interactions to learn comprehensive user portraits. SoMeR encodes user post streams as sequences of timestamped textual features, uses transformers to embed this along with profile data, and jointly trains with link prediction and contrastive learning objectives to capture user similarity. We demonstrate SoMeR's versatility through two applications: 1) Identifying inauthentic accounts involved in coordinated influence operations by detecting users posting similar content simultaneously, and 2) Measuring increased polarization in online discussions after major events by quantifying how users with different beliefs moved farther apart in the embedding space. SoMeR's ability to holistically model users enables new solutions to important problems around disinformation, societal tensions, and online behavior understanding.

As a generalization of graphs, hypergraphs are widely used to model higher-order relations in data. This paper explores the benefit of the hypergraph structure for the interpolation of point cloud data that contain no explicit structural information. We define the $\varepsilon_n$-ball hypergraph and the $k_n$-nearest neighbor hypergraph on a point cloud and study the $p$-Laplacian regularization on the hypergraphs. We prove the variational consistency between the hypergraph $p$-Laplacian regularization and the continuum $p$-Laplacian regularization in a semisupervised setting when the number of points $n$ goes to infinity while the number of labeled points remains fixed. A key improvement compared to the graph case is that the results rely on weaker assumptions on the upper bound of $\varepsilon_n$ and $k_n$. To solve the convex but non-differentiable large-scale optimization problem, we utilize the stochastic primal-dual hybrid gradient algorithm. Numerical experiments on data interpolation verify that the hypergraph $p$-Laplacian regularization outperforms the graph $p$-Laplacian regularization in preventing the development of spikes at the labeled points.

Alignment is a standard procedure to fine-tune pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions and serve as helpful AI assistants. We have observed, however, that the conventional alignment process fails to enhance the factual accuracy of LLMs, and often leads to the generation of more false facts (i.e. hallucination). In this paper, we study how to make the LLM alignment process more factual, by first identifying factors that lead to hallucination in both alignment steps:\ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we find that training the LLM on new knowledge or unfamiliar texts can encourage hallucination. This makes SFT less factual as it trains on human labeled data that may be novel to the LLM. Furthermore, reward functions used in standard RL can also encourage hallucination, because it guides the LLM to provide more helpful responses on a diverse set of instructions, often preferring longer and more detailed responses. Based on these observations, we propose factuality-aware alignment, comprised of factuality-aware SFT and factuality-aware RL through direct preference optimization. Experiments show that our proposed factuality-aware alignment guides LLMs to output more factual responses while maintaining instruction-following capability.

Chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT are now serving millions of users. Despite their widespread use, there remains a lack of public datasets showcasing how these tools are used by a population of users in practice. To bridge this gap, we offered free access to ChatGPT for online users in exchange for their affirmative, consensual opt-in to anonymously collect their chat transcripts and request headers. From this, we compiled WildChat, a corpus of 1 million user-ChatGPT conversations, which consists of over 2.5 million interaction turns. We compare WildChat with other popular user-chatbot interaction datasets, and find that our dataset offers the most diverse user prompts, contains the largest number of languages, and presents the richest variety of potentially toxic use-cases for researchers to study. In addition to timestamped chat transcripts, we enrich the dataset with demographic data, including state, country, and hashed IP addresses, alongside request headers. This augmentation allows for more detailed analysis of user behaviors across different geographical regions and temporal dimensions. Finally, because it captures a broad range of use cases, we demonstrate the dataset's potential utility in fine-tuning instruction-following models. WildChat is released at https://wildchat.allen.ai under AI2 ImpACT Licenses.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a prevalent complication in diabetes patients, can lead to vision impairment due to lesions formed on the retina. Detecting DR at an advanced stage often results in irreversible blindness. The traditional process of diagnosing DR through retina fundus images by ophthalmologists is not only time-intensive but also expensive. While classical transfer learning models have been widely adopted for computer-aided detection of DR, their high maintenance costs can hinder their detection efficiency. In contrast, Quantum Transfer Learning offers a more effective solution to this challenge. This approach is notably advantageous because it operates on heuristic principles, making it highly optimized for the task. Our proposed methodology leverages this hybrid quantum transfer learning technique to detect DR. To construct our model, we utilize the APTOS 2019 Blindness Detection dataset, available on Kaggle. We employ the ResNet-18, ResNet34, ResNet50, ResNet101, ResNet152 and Inception V3, pre-trained classical neural networks, for the initial feature extraction. For the classification stage, we use a Variational Quantum Classifier. Our hybrid quantum model has shown remarkable results, achieving an accuracy of 97% for ResNet-18. This demonstrates that quantum computing, when integrated with quantum machine learning, can perform tasks with a level of power and efficiency unattainable by classical computers alone. By harnessing these advanced technologies, we can significantly improve the detection and diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy, potentially saving many from the risk of blindness. Keywords: Diabetic Retinopathy, Quantum Transfer Learning, Deep Learning

This paper studies algorithmic decision-making in the presence of strategic individual behaviors, where an ML model is used to make decisions about human agents and the latter can adapt their behavior strategically to improve their future data. Existing results on strategic learning have largely focused on the linear setting where agents with linear labeling functions best respond to a (noisy) linear decision policy. Instead, this work focuses on general non-linear settings where agents respond to the decision policy with only "local information" of the policy. Moreover, we simultaneously consider the objectives of maximizing decision-maker welfare (model prediction accuracy), social welfare (agent improvement caused by strategic behaviors), and agent welfare (the extent that ML underestimates the agents). We first generalize the agent best response model in previous works to the non-linear setting, then reveal the compatibility of welfare objectives. We show the three welfare can attain the optimum simultaneously only under restrictive conditions which are challenging to achieve in non-linear settings. The theoretical results imply that existing works solely maximizing the welfare of a subset of parties inevitably diminish the welfare of the others. We thus claim the necessity of balancing the welfare of each party in non-linear settings and propose an irreducible optimization algorithm suitable for general strategic learning. Experiments on synthetic and real data validate the proposed algorithm.

This paper studies algorithmic decision-making under human's strategic behavior, where a decision maker uses an algorithm to make decisions about human agents, and the latter with information about the algorithm may exert effort strategically and improve to receive favorable decisions. Unlike prior works that assume agents benefit from their efforts immediately, we consider realistic scenarios where the impacts of these efforts are persistent and agents benefit from efforts by making improvements gradually. We first develop a dynamic model to characterize persistent improvements and based on this construct a Stackelberg game to model the interplay between agents and the decision-maker. We analytically characterize the equilibrium strategies and identify conditions under which agents have incentives to improve. With the dynamics, we then study how the decision-maker can design an optimal policy to incentivize the largest improvements inside the agent population. We also extend the model to settings where 1) agents may be dishonest and game the algorithm into making favorable but erroneous decisions; 2) honest efforts are forgettable and not sufficient to guarantee persistent improvements. With the extended models, we further examine conditions under which agents prefer honest efforts over dishonest behavior and the impacts of forgettable efforts.